Helena Bonham Carter was once known for art films, including Merchant-Ivory's A Room With a View and Howard's End, and Zeffirelli's spin on Hamlet. She has more recently taken less artsy roles, playing the self-help addict in Fight Club with Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, and as a chimp in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes. Bonham Carter may look like an ethereal English Rose, but she cusses, smokes, arm-wrestles. She has suffered through depression, undergone psychotherapy, and underwent a self-described "mid-life crisis" at 35. She later became the mother of two children with Burton.

She was born the youngest child of an English banker and his thoroughly mixed wife, who was half French, with a soupcon Jewish, Russian, Viennese, and Spanish. Bonham Carter's grandmother was Lady Violet Bonham Carter, a famous socialite, orator, and politician. Her great-grandfather was Prime Minister Lord Herbert Henry Asquith. Her cousin is British stage actor Crispin Bonham Carter. When Bonham Carter was five, her mother had a nervous breakdown. When she was 13, her father suddenly went deaf in one ear, then suffered a stroke during surgery and was paralyzed on one side and confined to a wheelchair. As her older brothers were already in college, only Helena remained at home to help with her father's care.

At thirteen she won a poetry contest and used the 25 pound prize to buy a listing in a British casting guide. Her first job was as Juliet in a radio ad for electronics, and she worked often in local theater as a teen. At 17, she played an Edwardian ghost in a British television movie called A Pattern of Roses. As union rules allowed only one non-union member in be cast, an unknown Hugh Grant, who was also not a union member at the time, was bumped from the movie to make room for her. After several corset-and-bustle film roles, Bonham Carter applied to attend Cambridge University, but, fearing she would drop out at midterms to make another film, she was turned down.

She played Don Johnson's junkie ex-fiancée in a few 1987 episodes of Miami Vice in 1987, and played a stripper in Dancing Queen, another British TV movie. In 1993 she won a Golden Globe for playing the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald in an American TV movie, Fatal Deception.

In 1994, while filming Frankenstein with Kenneth Branagh that she had her first highly publicized romance. While Branagh and his then-wife, Emma Thompson, went through a difficult breakup, Bonham Carter provided succor for Branaugh, an affair that lasted for five years. Bonham Carter reportedly lived with her parents until she was 30, when she moved in with Branagh. She was Oscar-nominated for her role as the scheming Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove, which included Bonham Carter nudity and a sex scene. She lost the award to Helen Hunt, but accepted the loss with a joke, saying, "I'd won for the first two syllables."

Her affair with Branaugh ended in 1999, and in 2001 Bonham Carter made movies with two more of her real-life leading men. In Novocaine, she played a patient who seduced her dentist (Steve Martin), into prescribing drugs for her. In Planet of the Apes, she played a chimp who fell for Mark Wahlberg, while Bonham Carter herself fell for the director, Burton. They spent thirteen years as a couple, but rather than living together, he bought the house next to hers and they broke a hole in the wall.